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Bad Air Quality? Here’s What You Can Do

Do you suspect that your home is suffering from bad air quality? You may suspect that you’re feeling the symptoms of bad air quality, or maybe an asthma or allergy-prone member of the family is constantly suffering. The first thing you want to do is get an indoor air quality test. After that, you can try any of these methods:

Sealing Duct Leaks

Central air conditioners and furnaces use ducts to transport air to the rooms of the home. However, for these ducts to work efficiently, they must be tightly sealed. A broken seal or disconnect can result in a huge waste of energy and wasted money on energy bills. Any quality air conditioning repair service in Sacramento, CA should be able to do this for you.

So, what’s this have to do with indoor air quality? Well, sealing your ducts isn’t purely going to benefit your efficiency. When there’s a leak in your ductwork, it’s going to pull in some air as well as release it.

Since the ducts are located in the attic or crawl space of a home, you can bet there will be plenty of dust, dirt, and who knows what else in there. Duct leaks can potentially spread this bad air through your home, contributing to lower indoor air quality.

Installing an Air Filter or Purifier

It’s inevitable that contaminants are going to find their way inside your home. The next best thing you can do is to fight them off with an air filter or purifier.

Now, to be clear, we aren’t referring to the air filter that went with your HVAC system when it was installed. This filter is purely to keep contaminants out of the parts and components of the HVAC system itself. This filter is important on its own, but it isn’t enough to drastically improve indoor air quality.

Instead, what we’re talking about is a filter or purifier that’s installed in your HVAC system separately, meant specifically to remove contaminants from the air circulation. The idea is that the contaminants floating through your home’s air—whether it’s pet dander, chemicals, or viruses—will continue to circulate as long as you continue to run your AC or heater. A filter or purifier is a checkpoint in the system that will remove these contaminants, and can then be disposed of along with the used-up filter.

Creating More Ventilation

Air filters and purifiers merely attack the symptoms of low indoor air quality—they don’t actively solve the problem. Of course, the best way to end your indoor air quality issues would be to remove the things causing the contaminants, but that’s not practical. No one’s asking you to give away your dog or give up on using cleaning supplies. Instead, you can directly combat these creators of indoor pollutants by introducing more ventilation into your home.

But then a problem arises: how do you ventilate your home while using your AC or heater? Opening a window is just going to release all the air you’ve spent money on. The answer is with heat and energy recovery ventilators. These devices are designed specifically to remove the old, stale air from your home and bring in the new, fresh air, without compromising home energy efficiency.